Profile

I’m a receptor pharmacologist, interested in the structure and function of the sites where drugs work. I investigated the actions of toxins on nicotinic acetylcholine receptors  for many years, using a technique called electrophysiology. That’s basically a way of measuring the tiny electrical charges that cells can pass back and forth across their membranes.

Receptors are proteins that receive messages that are being sent to a cell and then trigger the cell to respond somehow. The messages are usually small chemicals – neurotransmitters and hormones. The nicotinic acetylcholine receptor is one of the best understood receptors. It causes muscle to contract when neurones release a chemical signal called acetylcholine onto the muscle. The receptor gets its name because nicotine is one of the chemicals that can activate it.

Many  of the compounds I worked with came from plant and animal sources. I spent quite a lot of time working on a frog toxin called epibatidine from the phantasmal frog (top left). It’s deadly toxin, but also is a pain killer 200x stronger than morphine! Here’s a Manchester Museum web page on the frog that makes it. http://frogblogmanchester.com/about/poison-dart-frogs/phantasmal-dart-frog/

We also used snail toxins in our work quite a lot. Cone snails (top right) live in the sea and hunt fish. The big ones have enough venom to kill a human so if you are lucky enough to go to Australia or other tropical areas, be careful about picking up shells in the sea! Read about them here: they are really cool!

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/geographers-cone-snail/

I’ve got some of the shells on my desk. The biggest is a geography cone: it’s about 15 cm long and about 8 cm across. Definitely big enough to kill me if it was alive!

Cytisine is a natural toxin you can find in the UK. It is from laburnum trees (bottom left). It turns out that this toxin might be useful in helping people quit smoking as it acts on the brain in a similar way to nicotine. Cytisine has unusual properties at muscle nicotinic acetylcholine receptors and we used it to probe the structure of the receptor.

Cobras and other related snakes (bottom right) produce toxins that are really useful tools for working with nicotinic receptors because the toxins bind so tightly to the receptor. We used radioactive versions of the toxin to measure how much of the receptor we had in our samples, and what happened when we mutated the receptor.

In recent years I’ve spent most of my time developing e-learning material to help students understand the mechanisms behind drug action and I do a lot of teaching to students on biomedical, pharmacy and medical degrees here at the University of Manchester.
You can have a look at a few of my e-learning modules in the links below. Don’t worry too much if you don’t understand everything…. they are designed to go alongside lectures in which I explain a lot of this stuff.

The first one is about basic drug-receptor interactions:   https://softchalkcloud.com/lesson/serve/VkxfKJEmUGn1tQ/html
It aims to inject a little humour into what can be a very dry subject: the students have to look at the relationship between the dose of a drug (ReRug) and hair growth

– as you can see, I don’t mind humiliating myself a little in the name of science!

In this one I got my daughter and her friend to pose for a comic-strip about drug side effects: https://softchalkcloud.com/lesson/serve/lzCJq7INdRWUsS/html

The final one introduces an exercise in which students have to develop drugs to treat diseases of the garden gnome: https://softchalkcloud.com/lesson/serve/haNOURExWYBcQX/html (and here is a link to one of the gnome disease descriptions: https://www.softchalkcloud.com/lesson/serve/POrNV5knTEK0Se/html)

In addition to my interests in Pharmacology, I have a second life as a “music physiologist”! I’m currently running a research project called “How hard can you blow?” It’s investigating whether people who play brass band instrument like tubas and trombones have better lung function than the general population. My students and I have been out to brass bands across Greater Manchester and Yorkshire to test volunteers and we’ve found that the brass players do, on average, have stronger lung muscles.

I got into this project because I play in a couple of bands myself. Tuba in a brass band, and sax in a neon street band…. The Northern Lights Street Orchestra

You can read more about what I get up to with NLSO on our twitter feed

https://twitter.com/nlso77

All images: Creative Commons Licences, from Wikipedia

Phantasmal frog: H Crisp

Conus magus shell: R Parker

Cobra: KamainV

Laburnum: Andrew Dunn

I decided some years ago to move to the country and so I have to make an early start to beat the rush hour into Manchester. During term time, I usually get up about 4.30, walk our two labradoodles and then am at my desk by 7. Then, I’ll be answering emails from students and colleagues and trying to get enough coffee down my neck so I can do my lectures and tutorials.

This is the lecture theatre I do most of my teaching in. It holds 600 normally, but the roof can be raised so that it seats 1000 people! Normally my first year lectures are to between 400 and 600 students.

In the second half of the year,  I also teach a practical course based around the drug discovery process to second year B.Sc. Pharmacology students: that runs 11-5pm three days a week. Usually, I get home about 6.30pm but sometimes it’s much later because of visits to bands as part of the “How hard can you blow?” project.